Information technology organizations have long had the problem of understanding how their infrastructure supports particular business services. This is important for prioritization of work, understanding business impact, planning change and the like. It is also important for finding and fixing problems that are impacting end users. If end users report problems, the IT teams need to know where to look.
Known solutions leveraged a configuration management database. This is a database where configuration information could be stored. The configuration management database is outlined by the ITIL framework. The problem with the configuration management database is that it is very expensive and time consuming to set up (e.g., multiple years for most organizations) and quickly gets out of date. It also requires costly integration to all of the monitoring tools and the service desk. To try and solve this problem, dedicated discovery technologies could also be deployed. These discovery technologies could be used to understand what infrastructure is talking to what, but they lacked an application context and are error prone.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.